As the forest diminished, the Greywaren’s despair and wonder surged through Cabeswater. The trees sang soothingly back to him, a song of possibility and power and dreams, and then Cabeswater collected his wonder and put it into the life it was building.

And finally, the magician’s wistful regret twisted through what remained of the trees. Without this, what was he? Simply human, human, human. Cabeswater pressed leaves against his cheek one last time, and then they took that humanity for the life it was building.

It was nearly human-shaped. It would fit well enough. Nothing was ever perfect.

Make way for the Raven King.

The last tree fell, and the forest was gone, and everything was absolutely silent.

Blue touched Gansey’s face. She whispered, “Wake up.”

June evenings in Singer’s Falls were beautiful things. Lush and dark, the world painted in complicated greens. Trees: everywhere trees. Adam drove the winding road back to Henrietta in a slick little BMW that smelled of Ronan. The radio was playing Ronan’s terrible techno, but Adam didn’t turn it off. The world felt enormous.

He was going back to the trailer park.

It was time.

It was a thirty-minute drive from the Barns to the trailer park, so he had plenty of time to change his mind, to go back to St. Agnes or Monmouth Manufacturing instead.

But he drove past Henrietta to the trailer park, and then he drove down the long, bumpy drive to the trailers, his tyres kicking up a disintegrating thunderhead of dust behind him. Dogs leapt out to chase the car, vanishing by the time he arrived in front of his old home.

He didn’t have to ask if he was really doing this.

He was here, wasn’t he?

Adam climbed the rickety stairs. These stairs, once painted, now peeled and cracked, drilled with the perfectly round tracks of carpenter bees, weren’t very different from the stairs up to his apartment above St. Agnes. Just fewer of them here.

At the top of the stairs, he studied the door, trying to decide if he should knock or not. It had not been that many months since he had lived here, coming and going without announcement, but it felt like it had been years. He felt taller than he had been when he had been here last, too, although he surely couldn’t have grown that much since the summer before.

This was not his real home any more, so he knocked.

He waited, hands in the pockets of his pressed khaki slacks, looking at the clean toes of his shoes and then up again at the dusty door.

The door opened, and his father stood there, eye to eye with him. Adam felt a little more kindly to the past version of himself, the one who had been afraid of turning out like this man. Because although Robert Parrish and Adam Parrish didn’t look alike at first glance, there was something introverted and turned-inward about Robert Parrish’s gaze that reminded Adam of himself. Something about the knit of the eyebrows was similar, too; the shape of the furrow between them was precisely the shape of the continued difference between what life was supposed to be and what life was actually like.

Adam was not Robert, but he could have been, and he forgave that past Adam for being afraid of the possibility.

Robert Parrish stared at his son. Just behind him, in the dim room, Adam saw his mother, who was looking past Adam to the BMW.

“Invite me in,” Adam said.

His father lingered, one nostril flaring, but he retreated back into the house. He turned a hand in a sort of mocking invitation, a gesture of pretend fealty to a false king.

Adam stepped in. He had forgotten how compressed their lives were here. He had forgotten how the kitchen was the same as the living room was the same as the master bedroom, and on the other side of the main room, Adam’s tiny bedroom. He could not blame them for resentfully carving out that space; there was no other place to be in this house that was not looking at each other. He had forgotten how claustrophobia had driven him outside as much as fear.

“Nice of you to call,” his mother said.

He always forgot how she used to drive him out, too. Her words were a more slippery kind of assault, sliding out of his memory more easily than his father’s actual blows, sliding in between the ribs of that younger Adam when he wasn’t paying attention. There was a reason why he had learned to hide alone, not with her.

“I missed you at graduation today,” Adam replied evenly.

“I didn’t feel welcome,” she said.

“I asked you to come.”

“You made it ugly.”

“Wasn’t me who made it ugly.”

Her eyes glanced off him, most of her vanishing at the first sign of active conflict.

“What do you want, Adam?” his father asked. He was still staring at Adam’s clothing, as if he thought that it might be what had changed. “I don’t guess it’s because you’re begging to move back in, now that you’re all graduated and fancy and driving your boyfriend’s beemer.”

“I came to see if there was any possibility of having a normal relationship with my parents before I leave for college,” Adam replied.

His father’s mouth worked. It was hard to tell if he was shocked by the content of Adam’s statement, or just by the fact of Adam’s voice at all. It was not a thing that had been heard often in this room. It was perplexing to Adam how he had regarded this as normal for so long. He remembered how the neighbours used to turn away from his bruised face; he used to think, stupidly, that they said nothing because they thought he had somehow deserved it. Now, though, he wondered how many of them had huddled on the floor in front of their sofas, or hidden in their rooms, or cried beneath the little porch in the bitter rain. He felt a sudden urge to save all these other Adams hidden in plain view, though he didn’t know if they would listen to him. It struck him as a Gansey or a Blue impulse, and as he held that tiny, heroic spark in his mind, he realized that it was only because he believed that he had saved himself that he could imagine saving someone else.

“You were the one who made this impossible,” his father said. “You’re the one who made this ugly, just like your mother said.”

He seemed petulant to Adam now, not fearsome. Everything about his body language, shoulders curled like a fern, chin tucked, indicated that he would no sooner hit Adam than he would hit his boss. The last time he had raised a hand to his son, he’d had to pull a bloody thorn out of it, and Adam could see the disbelief of that moment still registering in him. Adam was other. Even without Cabeswater’s force, he could feel it glimmering coolly in his eyes, and he did nothing to disguise it. Magician.